Firefighters routinely place themselves in dangerous situations when fighting fires from rooftops of burning structures. Specialized tools and techniques have been developed to aid firefighters in these applications. While many fires present characteristics common to both vertical and horizontal ventilation, vertical ventilation often requires significant safety considerations, specialized tools, knowledge of roof openings, roof construction, roof coverings, and procedures for opening the roof.
While vertical ventilation doesn't in itself extinguish a fire, it provides effective containment of a fire's movement through a structure, and can reduce property damage. Removal of smoke allows more efficient rescue of victims who are overcome by smoke as visibility is improved once smoke is removed. One method of vertical ventilation by which smoke and heat may be removed from a structure is by opening the roof at its highest point, reducing the danger of a backdraft or a flashover and allowing water to be applied down into the structure onto the fire. Vertical ventilation utilizes skills that must be practiced, such as maintaining safety of the firefighters, providing a second egress from the roof, having charged attack and protection lines ready, observing wind direction and intensity, noting dead loads and obstructions on a roof, constantly observing the roof and evaluating roofing materials and the condition of the roof, locating the seat of the fire, cutting large openings, and avoiding roof collapse when the roof is weakened by fire. Pitched roofs are the most difficult rooftops from which firefighters perform vertical ventilation. Pitched roofs are usually supported by wooden rafters, laminated beams, or wooden or steel trusses spanning the shortest distance between bearing walls. In the average home, the space between the roof and the ceiling defines and attic space, which may be vented by louvers under gable end of the roof.
Firefighters are trained carefully on vertical ventilation because of the inherent danger of operating at a distance above the ground. Training is performed on elevated structures, where firefighters practice using tools for operations such as hauling tools up ladders, operating tools safely on rooftops, such as chain saws, rotary saws, stripping tools, pike poles, sledgehammers, rubbish hooks and pickhead axes, cutting openings in a rooftop, lowering firefighters and/or equipment through such openings, and safely extracting people from such openings and evacuating people from rooftops. Typically, such training takes place on a stationary, permanently fixed training structure that is embodied in an elevated platform. Because of size, the construction of such structures is costly, they generally have only one configuration and one slope, and all training activities have to take place at the site of the structure.
There is thus a heartfelt need for a firefighting training apparatus that is portable, compact, easily deployed, and having multiple training features for different firefighting operations such as vertical ventilation, forcible entry, confined space entry, extraction procedures, as well as rooftop safety and safe operation of tools in a rooftop application.